


coastal highway blues

by that_this_will_do



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Ambiguity, Driving, Late at Night, M/M, POV Second Person, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-07-10
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:00:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25192819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/that_this_will_do/pseuds/that_this_will_do
Summary: Do you remember the sound a car makes going down an empty highway?
Relationships: Alexander Hamilton/George Washington
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	coastal highway blues

**Author's Note:**

> Washington POV

Do you remember the sound a car makes, going down an empty highway?

Those nights of driving through places you’ll only visit once. You were a stranger. Passer-by. Driving down a highway to be someone else. Highway signs your only welcome. Traffic lights that mean you’ve gone too far, and their little neon shadows. Rain on windshield. Silence on the line. That sound.

Do you  _ remember  _ it? Can you hear it now, even in this city of glass and sidewalk? Can you hear the lull, the low hum, the dull rumble? Tires on asphalt, engine on cruise. Listen. Remember. Rhythm rolling. The closest the world could get to having a heartbeat. 

Is the city noise every enough to drown it out? Curled up under the sheets in your apartment like this? Do you find that sound in the darker corners of your brain, the only music as you try to fall asleep? Do you find yourself falling into it? 

Falling. 

In the car, in the dark, driving down a highway to somewhere you’ve never been.

You’re in the driver’s seat.

There’s a wheel beneath your palms. It’s reassuring, has always been reassuring, the one part of the world that never felt unnaturally small. The first time you held a wheel of a car, when you were sixteen, and your hands were too big for anything else. Smooth leather, it was a good stiff frame--man enough even when you weren’t, even when you thought you couldn’t be.

You’re driving west, you’d know it even if you had your eyes closed. There are shapes moving in the dark, or rather shapes the land makes and you’re moving past them. West, following a song you heard on the radio, west to some sort of freedom. 

Your bones creak as you move, and you can see all of the lines in your face in the rearview mirror. You are forty-five years old. This is surprising, although you can’t remember if it’s because you’re not that old, or you never thought you would be. Age used to matter more, now it matters most. Sometimes it feels like there’s a number where your name should be, a list of ideas where there should be a story. 

There’s a young man in the passenger seat. You don’t want to look over, you’re terrified of the shoulders, the eyes, that wide easy smile. You have nothing but the unsaid words to offer, and not even that to ask for. 

Just that sound. Remember? Car on an empty highway. Demon when you had nothing to run from. Destination when you had nowhere to run to. That rumble. That low, soft lull. 

You look. And of course, the ghost of might-be and miss-you evaporates. And of course, it is the boy. This is not surprising. 

There was a word that tried to hide itself before. You know now that word is  _ beautiful.  _ You look over at his face in the dark, lit by passing shadows. Cheekbones and eyes, dark and wet and white. His hair falls black and heavy over his shoulders, like an ocean rolling at the bottom of a cliff. The line of his face, the one that traces from the middle of his forehead down the bridge of his nose, that contains the sudden dip at the top of his lips, cuts a sharp silhouette against your windshield. 

You drive. There is music. There is the hum of the tires against the asphalt. There is the boy.

“Where are we going?” he asks.

“West,” you say. And he smiles, wide and easy. You release your hand from the wheel, lay it over his shoulder, let it slide down the gentle in the dark. He is cold, as always. He shifts beneath your hand, twisting in the moonlight. His heartbeat is right there against your palms.

Do you know the sound a car makes, going down an empty highway? Has it ever felt like that moment, that sound, was the closest the world was ever going to get to having a heart? Can you hear that lull, that rumble that was once, simply, enough?

You wake up in your apartment in New York City. Alone, of course. For a second, you cannot resist the temptation to close your eyes, but the car is gone. Instead, there is the pitter-patter city--New York at 4am--and the unpleasant knowledge that you are in love. 

**Author's Note:**

> what's done is done. this is done. on tumblr @thatthiswilldo


End file.
